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SPIRIT OF THE FRONTIER
9
Transcript
The Legacy of the Frontier Spirit
Individualism.
Distrust of communal organizations.
Resistance to society establishing codes of community behavior.
It continues today in
Unqualified value of private property, including the belief that property owners have the right to exploit their land in whatever way they see fit.
A distrust of public land and the notion of the commons.
SPIRIT OF THE FRONTIER
The Ideology of Progress
Development
- The frontier spirit is linked to the ideology of “progress” and “manifest destiny.” “Conquering” or “taming” the “wilderness” (and Native Americans) is part of progress and our destiny.
- The explosive growth of suburbs and sharply increasing use of the automobile spurs urban sprawl as inner cities decline.
- Family farms are rapidly lost as federal policy supports industrial agriculture based on expensive machinery and chemicals.
- Logging, mining, dam-building, grazing increase in the West.
- All this is presented as “progress” and “development”: economically good, morally right, and inevitable.
- Development is the new Manifest Destiny.
The Frontier Spirit
- Settling the frontier involved leaving the relative security of village or city to move to an unsettled land.
- It required courage, ingenuity, and perseverance.
- It is also tended to foster an extreme individualism, resistant to restrictions imposed by a community for the communal good
Attitudes Towards Nature
- To a certain degree there was a sense of nature as “chaotic” needing to be conquered and tamed.
- It accentuated the anthropocentric view of nature as mere resource to be controlled and exploited.
- Despite the difficulties and dangers faced, the vastness of the West suggested nature as being an endless supply of resources.
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